Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse

Karen Hesse is an American author of literature for children and young adults, best known for fiction that brings young voices close to historical upheaval. Her protagonists experience the Dust Bowl in Out of the Dust, flight from Russian Civil War violence in Letters from Rifka, and the Ku Klux Klan’s attempt to gain power in a Vermont community in Witness. Hesse often works through intimate documentary forms, including letters, diaries, dated poems, and interlinked first-person monologues. These structures bring public events into the realm of private fear, divided loyalties, and family strain. Her prose tends to be spare, lyrical, and strongly attentive to voice, while The Music of Dolphins shows her formal experimentation extending beyond historical fiction. Out of the Dust, which received the Newbery Medal, established the poetic-prose method she later continued in the multiple perspectives of Witness. Across her work, form and perspective shape how young characters encounter histories larger than themselves.